By Timothy W. Luke · Wednesday, July 11, 2018 On June 8, 2018, Telos celebrated its fiftieth anniversary at a special event held in New York City. Speakers included Telos editors Russell Berman, Tim Luke, David Pan, and Adrian Pabst, as well as Jacob Siegel, who delivered a talk on “Telos, Post-liberal Politics, and a Veteran’s Reading of Ernst Jünger.” Videos of the event are available at the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website. Telos 183 (Summer 2018), our fiftieth anniversary issue, is available for purchase in our store. Presented below is a transcript of Tim Luke’s remarks at the anniversary event.
To address the history of Telos, I will open this brief account tonight about the journal by recalling my history with Telos since 1975. As a new cadre in “the St. Louis TELOS group,” I began by unloading boxes of Telos 26 (Winter 1975–76) from a panel truck early on a Saturday morning during the winter break outside of McMillan Hall, where Paul Piccone and the Telos office were embedded in the Sociology Department of Washington University, St. Louis. Working then as what we call an “intern” today, I soon was translating “into” the American English various versions of different draft manuscripts. Many articles at that time came through the mail as pages of disorderly text that another individual, like the author or an associate, with some English skills translated “out of” Czech, German, Hungarian, Italian, or Polish into a global semi-Anglophonic creole.
Continue reading →
By David Pan · Thursday, September 14, 2017 The following paper was presented at the conference “After the End of Revolution: Constitutional Order amid the Crisis of Democracy,” co-organized by the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute and the National Research University Higher School of Economics, September 1–2, 2017, Moscow..
The idea of liberal democracy only makes sense because of a basic contradiction between liberalism and democracy. As a description of a form of government, democracy designates a government by the people, whose decision-making power would not be restricted by any higher authority. The power of democracy derives from its ability to mobilize a majority of the members of a political order for collective goals. This rule by popular will can also entail a freedom from higher authorities, including such entities like monarchs and aristocrats, but also ecclesiastical or moral authorities that would establish basic values for guiding decision-making. Since democracy alone would lack constraints on the popular will, liberalism, as a set of principles that include protection of minorities and freedom of expression, is needed to provide the limitations on democratic decision-making that protect democracy from erratic and changes in the public mood. As such, liberalism sets a limit on democratic power, and the basic contradiction between democracy and liberalism maintains a dynamic equilibrium between popular will and liberal principles that can be stabilizing due to its flexibility.
Continue reading →
By Telos Press · Friday, April 14, 2017 Twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, there is arguably a crisis of democracy: not only has the transition from totalitarian communism failed to bring about liberal market capitalism, but politics in mature democracies has been becoming post-democratic. Models of authoritarianism and state capitalism are spreading in different parts of the world, while countries with long-standing democratic traditions are characterized by a rejection of the political mainstream and a turn to extremes on the far left or the far right.
Continue reading →
By Telos Press · Friday, January 20, 2017 At the 2017 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute Conference, held this past weekend in New York City, Steven Metz delivered a keynote address entitled “Future Conflict and the Conceptual Prison of Asymmetry.” We are delighted to present the full video of the address below.
Continue reading →
By Philip Roscoe · Monday, July 18, 2016 Sacrifice, or at least the discourse of sacrifice, is a recognizable aspect of popular management discourse and management scholarship of the “post-bureaucratic” variety, especially popular in America from the 1980s to the 2000s. The absence of bureaucratic structures of command necessitates other forms of authority, and notions of sacrifice form part of the symbolic armory of the post-bureaucratic chief executive—though, of course, post-bureaucracy is itself a symbolic myth more than a practical solution. In this talk I will set out some aspects and suggest, playfully, that there are crypto-theologies at work in management discourse and scholarship; I will finish by connecting these to the sacrifice and excess inherent in neoliberal forms of organization.
Continue reading →
By Telos Press · Friday, March 25, 2016 The members of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute are the primary supporters of its activities. They participate in Institute events and allow the Institute to continue and expand its programs. Members have the opportunity to join the discussions that shape intellectual debates on contemporary issues.
Continue reading →
|
|
